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Google DeepMind: Is AI becoming more alien?

Google's
DeepMind says it has made another big advance in Artificial Intelligence (AI)
by getting a machine to master the Chinese game of Go without help from human
players.

The AlphaGo
program, devised by the tech giant's AI division, has already beaten two of the
world's best players.

It had
started by learning from thousands of games played by humans.

But the new
AlphaGo Zero began with a blank Go board and no data apart from the rules, and
then played itself.

Within 72
hours it was good enough to beat the original program by 100 games to zero.

DeepMind's
chief executive, Demis Hassabis, said the system could now have more general
applications in scientific research.

"We're
quite excited because we think this is now good enough to make some real
progress on some real problems even though we're obviously a long way from full
AI," he told the Media.

The
London-based artificial intelligence company's software defeated leading South
Korean Go player Lee Se-dol by four games to one last year.

In a game
where there are more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe, it
was a triumph for machine over man and one that came much earlier than many in
the AI world had expected.

AlphaGo
followed this with the defeat of the world's number one Go player, China's Ke
Jie, in May.

As with many
advances in this field, the achievements required the combination of vast
amounts of data - in this case records of thousands of games - and a lot of
computer-processing power.

David
Silver, who led that effort, says the team took a very different approach with
AlphaGo Zero.

"The
new version starts from a neural network that knows nothing at all about the
game of Go," he explained.

"The
only knowledge it has is the rules of the game. Apart from that, it figures
everything out just by playing games against itself."

What is Go?

Go is
thought to date back to ancient China, several thousand years ago.

Using black
and white stones on a grid, players gain the upper hand by surrounding their
opponents' pieces with their own.

The rules
are simpler than those of chess, but a player typically has a choice of 200
moves at most points in the game, compared with about 20 in chess.

It can be
very difficult to determine who is winning, and many of the top human players
rely on instinct.

This has
turned out to be far more efficient way of addressing the problem.

Whereas
AlphaGo took months to get to the point where it could take on a professional,
AlphaGo Zero got there in just three days, using a fraction of the processing
power.

"It
shows it's the novel algorithms that count, not the compute power or the
data," says Mr Silver.

He enthuses
about an idea some may find rather scary - that in just a few days a machine
has surpassed the knowledge of this game acquired by humanity over thousands of
years.

"We've
actually removed the constraints of human knowledge and it's able, therefore,
to create knowledge itself from first principles, from a blank slate," he
said.

Whereas
earlier versions quickly learned from and improved upon human strategies,
AlphaGo Zero developed techniques which the professional player who advised
DeepMind said he had never seen before.

Many of the
team have now moved on to new projects where they are trying to take this
technique to new areas. Demis Hassabis mentions drug design and the discovery
of new materials as areas of interest.

Whereas some
see a threat from AI, he looks ahead with optimism.

"I hope
these kind of algorithms will be routinely working with us as scientific
experts medical experts on advancing the frontiers of science and medicine -
that's what I hope," he says.

But he and
his colleagues are cautious about how rapidly we will see the wider application
of these AI techniques - a game with clear rules and no element of luck is one
thing, the messy, random, unpredictable real world quite another.

I wrote
earlier this week about the tidal wave of AI hype pouring into my email inbox.
AlphaGo Zero is at the other end of the spectrum - proper peer-reviewed science
with a real advance in computer intelligence.

We need to
keep a close eye on the ethical dilemmas involved in developing a machine that,
by some definitions, can think for itself - especially when it is controlled by
a giant like Google.

But for now,
there are few signs that AlphaGo Zero and its ilk will either steal our jobs or
threaten to make humanity obsolete.

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